Faith & the seva of a lifetime

Becoming an expert in the cooking of a country might seem to require being from that country. How else would you know the nuances of ingredients and tricks of cooking techniques if you had not grown up observing them? Yet, there are several cases where people have come to places quite unfamiliar to them and become acknowledged experts in the local cuisine, even using their outsider status to ask questions and make useful observations that local cooks would ignore or treat as too routine.

Julia Child with French cuisine and Diana Kennedy with Mexican cuisine are two great examples, their books acknowledged as authoritative even within these countries. Paula Wolfert with Moroccan food, Margaret Shaida with Persian food and David Thompson with Thai food might count as more recent examples. But for an Indian equivalent, I think the one name that would come before all others would be Yamuna Devi who I only recently learned passed away in December 2011.

Perhaps I just missed the news at that time, but it is also possible that it was hardly reported outside the world she lived in, of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). It was ISKCON’s founder Swami Prabhupada himself who gave the American-born Joan Campanella the name Yamuna Devi Dasi. She met him in 1966, shortly after he had first come to the USA and few had heard of him.

Among his first followers was Campanella’s sister and her fiancé who started taking Sanskrit and Bhagvad Gita classes with him, and soon were impressed enough to ask him to marry them. Campanella arrived in New York for the wedding with, she would later write, “apathy towards anything ‘spiritual’” and expecting a traditional marriage.

Start with a wedding feast

Instead she met an older Indian man who invited her for the lunch he had cooked. The vegetarian food she was served was nothing like she had ever eaten: “It was light, vibrant and subtly seasoned. As a cook, I was fascinated.” Perhaps sensing her interest, the Swami told her that he was going to cook the wedding feast — and she would be his assistant.

On the morning of the wedding he put her to work stuffing aloo kachoris while he worked in the small kitchen: “He was organised and impeccably clean, simultaneously preparing up to four dishes at a time.” He worked mostly by hand, measuring and mixing the ingredients, all with speed and grace. Fascinated by this spiritual man who took such pleasure in cooking, she started going for his classes, and soon was a devotee. After bestowing the name she would use for the rest of her life, the Swami then asked her to be his personal chef.

She had no experience of real Indian food before meeting him, she told me in an email interview I did with her in 2005: “In the ’40s and ’50s when someone served an Indian meal it was little more than ‘anything’ served with a curry powder-bechamel sauce. Woeful food not fit to be called Indian…” Vegetarian food of any kind was also rare, and here was the Swami asking her to cook not just real Indian food, but the vegetarian Vaishnav food he ate, which allowed not even the easy flavour fallbacks of onions and garlic. But she would learn the way he had himself, closely watching how he cooked and learning how to replicate it, the way he had learned, as a young Bengali boy named Abhay Charan De, growing up in Calcutta.

He was never taught how to cook, but he learned from watching the women in his family, and the vendors in the street cook, and this knowledge would become vital when he left home, first to travel to gurusin India, and then when he went abroad and had to cook if he wanted food he could eat. The Swami taught her, but more by just doing while she was expected to watch and try to replicate it.

Later on, when Yamuna Devi accompanied him back to India, there were more lessons, more watching other people cooking, like his sister, who she called pishima and who was a skilled cook, or the cooks in the temples they visited, or the Vaishnav families who hosted and fed them. She always scrupulously recorded not just the family from who the recipe came, but the name of their cook, like SB Sharma, the chef at the home of the Calcutta industrialist CL Bajoria, who taught her how to make parathas stuffed with fresh peas, singharas stuffed with potatoes and coconut and spinach made with almonds.

Because these devotees were spread across India, she learned different recipes — peanut chutney from the Sharma family in Madhya Pradesh, lauki dal from the Radha-Ramana temple in Vrindavan, cornmeal idlis from the Radha Govinda Mandir in Hyderabad, cauliflower cooked whole from the kitchens of Maharani Gayatri Devi, dahi vadas from Kailash Seksaria in Mumbai.

Because she was cooking for her guru, she was ready to do so even in unpromising situations, like when they were on a train and none of the food was suitable. Yamuna Devi asked the pantry staff if she could just cook him some plain rice and when they refused, she threatened to jump off the train. To keep “the crazy white lady” quiet, they let her use one of their big, battered pots, where she cooked a small amount of rice for him.

From cooking to cookbooks

And then one day he told her she had to teach others what she had learned. “If you don’t distribute what you know, then you will become envious,” he said. And so she started writing cookbooks, some on general vegetarian cooking, but her magnum opus was Lord Krishna’s Cuisine: the Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking and this is easily one of the great Indian cookbooks.

It is massive, almost 800 pages long, and in the years since there have been other big books on Indian food, yet few that come close to this one. I sometimes feel that anyone planning to write an Indian cookbook, whatever the food involved, should first take a look at Lord Krishna’s Cuisine to see how it should be done.

Partly it is the great detail, which Yamuna Devi communicated precisely, but not in an intimidating way. Her chapter on Indian breads, always so tricky to make well, can seem daunting in the length of recipes for simple puris, chapattis, parathas. But the recipes are absorbing as you read them, and you get the small tricks that come naturally to those who have made these breads all their lives, but which those doing it fresh will usually miss out. And instead of using photographs to illustrate the process, she used line drawings based on photographs which are much easier to understand.

She also understood the importance of the simplest ingredients —chapatti flour, for example, which most cookbooks just translate as wholewheat, but Yamuna Devi knew that Indian flour is ground finer than western wholewheat. She suggested mixing two parts of the fine wholewheat flour sold in health stores for pastry, with one-third white cake flour or else just sifting wholewheat flour to remove the coarse bran flakes that will make the chapattis tough. She went into details of special Indian ingredients, but also listed western equivalents that might work well, like parsnips and spaghetti squash.

Cookbooks aimed at a western audience often leave out the Indian dishes that people abroad might find hard to appreciate, like those using bitter ingredients, or those Bengali dishes called charcharis which are actually meant to be slightly burned. But the Swami loved them — he would take dried karelawhen he left India to make sure of supplies — and Yamuna Devi lists them all.

Such dishes are an indication of the essentially Bengali vegetarian nature of this book, with few South Indian ones, other than idli and dosa, and a scattering of vegetarian dishes from the rest of India.

Keeping memories alive

In the memories ISKCON devotees recorded after Yamuna Devi passed away, one of them mentions a remark from the Swami that touches on a less than pleasant side of him: he was fanatical about having it cleaned and once after he found a spot on it, he said with reproof: “This is Muslim. No Vaisnava will ever leave a black spot on any of the pots in the kitchen.”

It is a small reminder of some less-than-savoury aspects of the Swami, but none of this, or the other controversies that rocked ISKCON, seems to have touched Yamuna Devi. After his death, she worked in different ISKCON centres, keeping his memory alive, before settling down in an ashram in western Canada. She was particularly known for her skill in singing bhajans and kirtans, and her voice can be heard everyday in ISKCON temples and also in collaborations with the Beatles when George Harrison was starting to get interested in Indian music (her book has a recipe for a gobi mung dal khichuri that she says she first cooked when they were staying with John Lennon and Yoko Ono).

But despite the way Krishna worship guided every part of her life, she did not proselytise in her book. Apart from the occasional anecdotes about the Swami, all else is professional and to the point (it took me some time even to realise the recipes had no onions and garlic, and why!). When she emailed me from her ashram, she was focussed on her hopes for how the world was coming to realise the benefits of vegetarian food, and how vital Indian cuisine was for this.

“No country comes close to the artful traditional of its regional vegetarian cuisines,” she wrote, and it was clearly part of her seva to bring this knowledge to a wider world through her wonderful book.